Three Angry Women and a Baby

by Kerrie Noor

  The Bag Lady disappeared into the trees with just a flicker of a pen torchlight.

  I looked up. “Did she hear?”

  “Wouldn’t worry,” said Neff. “Betty will soon follow.”

  Betty tutted, pulled a mega-large high-beam torch from her bag, and strode into the forest with a “what’s she up to now?”

  Neff nudged me as Betty’s torch lit up the trees like a stadium, making mysterious shapes that waved in the wind.

  There was a rustle . . .

  Followed by a shout . . .

  “Mind!”

  “Mind?”

  “That’s my toe.”

  “Is it? Fuck.”

  Silence . . .

  More rustling . . .

  We stared into the shadows of the forest as torchlights flickered and flashed.

  “Don’t shine it there . . . there!”

  “Where?”

  “I said there . . . here, give me that.”

  “It’s my friggin’ torch.”

  Mavis topped our glasses with a “more?”

  Betty finally appeared with the Bag Lady behind her rubbing dirt from a skull.

  She held it high in the air. “What do you think?” she shouted to the group.

  “It’s a skull, like all the others,” muttered Betty.

  “Yes, but painted with smiley faces”—she turned it in her hand—“and glitter. Baby Bea will love it.”

  “Since when have you done smiley faces?” snapped Betty.

  The Bag Lady, with a pleased-with-herself smile, headed inside to wash the skull with Betty behind her shouting, “You can’t do that in the sink.”

  The other women laughed as I withdrew Baby Bea from my breast—limp as a rag doll, zoned out like she was stoned. The women watched as I put her into her basket, then Neff pulled out the Bag Lady’s drum.

  An hour later, the women were dancing, and I was watching like I had never seen it before.

  It seemed a century ago that I danced for the wrestlers.

  When I first discovered belly dancing, it was like sex. I wasn’t getting any, and hip-circling really soothed the feeling.

  Steven still talks of the first time he saw me dance: “the sexiest thing with clothes on,” he called it. And it wasn’t long before I was giving him private dances; he loved them, cheered me on, even videoed me.

  “My sexy goddess,” he used to say, along with other delicious things which usually led to wonderful sex.

  It seemed a lifetime ago . . .

  I hadn’t felt sexy in ages. My body felt like one of Mum’s pumpkins, and as for sex, I’d rather have a tooth pulled.

  I watched the others laugh and dance with no intention of joining in. I used to love dancing in front of a spellbound crowd; it seems a century ago now. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to the Egyptian drums. My bits felt like they had been ripped apart, circling them was the last thing I wanted to do.

  I could see Neff working up to pulling me up and Iona stopping her. Then the drumming stopped as Helen walked in.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Parking Attendant

  “I’m sorry” doesn’t always cut the mustard.

  When Helen arrived, the laughing stopped; she looked anything but happy. Her “going shopping” clothes were splattered with flecks of blood, and she looked like she had been bawling her eyes out.

  “You finally made it,” said Mavis.

  Neff patted a log with a “still warm.”

  We waited . . .

  “Amy is a bit fucked off,” she said.

  I handed Helen a drink.

  “I went mental at a parking attendant.”

  Silence.

  “Forgot about the parking meter.”

  She stared into the fire . . .

  We waited.

  She sipped.

  “Go on,” said Neff.

  “It’s not nice,” muttered Helen.

  “Just tell us,” said Neff.

  Helen drained her glass and talked of her day with Amy like it had happened to someone else, like a scene in a movie.

  “We were looking at wedding dresses,” she said. “And we almost had a mother-and-daughter moment when Henry phoned with a ‘money’s no object when it comes to my baby girl’ offer.”

  “That was nice of him,” said Mavis.

  “That’s what Amy said,” muttered Helen. She looked at her empty glass.

  “But you can’t deal with it,” said Betty.

  “Well, yes.”

  “It’s like it’s a competition and, well, you’re losing,” said Betty.

  Helen looked at her. “Yes.”

  “She’s your daughter,” said Mavis. “Every daughter loves their mum . . .” She caught my eye and stopped. “Don’t they?”

  “It’s not like I’m loaded,” said Helen. “All I can offer is a hug and a listening ear. He’s the one who kept the business, the house, and the cat. I don’t even have a fucking cat and Amy loves them.”

  “Cat? What’s cats got to do with it?” muttered Mavis.

  “My sister went through the same thing,” said Betty. “Her husband bribed their children with horses.”

  “Horses?” said Mavis.

  “So what happened next?” said Neff, gesturing to the blood.

  “Then I see a podgy parking attendant,” said Helen, “with a face like an avalanche. I waved at her, she pretended she didn’t see, so I ran to the window. ‘I’m just coming out,’ I shouted, and do you know what she did?”

  “I can guess,” muttered Mavis.

  “She blanked me—”

  “Bloody parking attendants,” said Mavis.

  “—and pulled out her fucking pad.”

  Helen, still with a blank face, went on to describe how she tried to reason with a woman who “made Trump look like a fairy godmother.”

  She sipped.

  “Then Henry drove by in his fancy ‘I’m a great shag’ sports car with a toot and a blonde . . . and get this.”

  “What?”

  “He offered to help me.” She looked at us. “‘Can I help?’ he said.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Neff.

  Helen, ignoring Neff, carried on. She talked of seeing red, yelling, an embarrassed daughter, and her wrestling a pad from a parking attendant who had the grip of a Rottweiler.

  “It gets a bit blurry after that,” said Helen, “but I’ll never forget the look on Amy’s face when the police arrived. ‘Mum,’ she said.”

  Helen sighed.

  “And?” said Neff.

  “Can’t remember what else.” Helen looked at me. “Apparently the attendant has a black eye.”

  Helen slumped. “And I called her ‘Hitler incarnate.’”

  “Jesus wept,” muttered Mavis.

  “Bit strong,” muttered Iona.

  Helen stared into the fire.

  “Plus, I think I overused the word fuck. In fact, I might have a told a few to fuck off.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Betty.

  “Including a policeman.”

  “I’m sure he’s been told to fuck off plenty of times,” said the Bag Lady.

  Helen, thanks to a decent policeman, was given a fine, along with mandatory anger management classes. The parking attendant had a record of being assaulted due to her ability to ignore drivers’ “I’m just coming out” waves. She, having failed her driver test so many times she had a standing order at the test centre, hated all drivers and paced her patch like a sniffer dog on the scent of something illegal.

  Some say she had tampered with the meters, which, according to the same “some,” was being “looked into.”

  Helen retreated into her bedsit, refusing any “fancy a spot of lunch?” from Mum. It seems the parking ticket had pushed her over the edge.

  Mum suggested I visit and talk about “building and tools” to help “take her mind off things.”

  Me, help her?

  I mean, I was struggling to be a mum, let alone
a stay-at-home mum. Baby Bea woke several times during the night and took ages to feed. I was so tired I dropped off as soon as I sat down and burst into tears at anything; even the Simpsons made me blubber. And our new house, which seemed the size of a hotel compared to the old bedsit, seemed impossible to keep tidy. I couldn’t remember where I put anything.

  I burnt toast, made soft hard-boiled eggs. Steven said little until I tossed a burnt pan at the remains of the bonfire accompanied by a volley of swear words; then he took over not only the cooking but the shopping with a “perhaps we should see a doctor?”

  How could I help someone else, especially a woman on the verge of exploding? Whose reasoning was on par with Homer Simpson’s?

  Mum said it was all those years of bottling it up that had cracked Helen. “Being nice has a price,” she said, “when you do it to survive.”

  Which was rich coming from the same mouth that blasted me on a regular basis about my lack of “mum skills.”

  I tried to tell my mother that I was busy, that perhaps she, being the “font of all knowledge,” was probably better placed to help.

  Mum, ignoring the “font of all knowledge,” arranged a time for me to have some lunch and visit Helen while she could “see to the wee one.” Which meant her changing nappies, followed by comments about Baby Bea’s imaginary skin conditions and weight loss.

  After a lunch of forgettable soup and sandwiches, I ventured across on the pretense of seeing Helen. I was not in the best of trim, as Mum, having spotted a real live rash under Baby Bea’s neck, talked with patronizing mummy-ness about the wonders of zinc.

  I was feeling the sting of being wrong. I knew there was a pot of zinc in the boot somewhere, and I was on a mission to find it—bugger the whole Helen issue.

  As I headed to the car, fantasying about proving Mum wrong, I heard Amy and Helen talking. The bedsit wasn’t exactly soundproof.

  Amy was worried about her mother’s ability to “ruin her big day,” as she was showing signs of paranoia on par with a Russian spy.

  In her blind rage during the parking meter incident, Helen had called Henry a middle-aged degenerate hitting on blondes young enough to be his granddaughter. “A sports car is not a penis,” she shouted, which had pretty much been the last straw for Amy.

  I stopped at my car, opened the boot, and began to rummage as Amy called her mother a moron who “jumped to conclusions that even a moron would be ashamed of.”

  “That’s ’cause nobody tells me anything,” said Helen.

  “That’s ’cause you explode like a landmine,” said Amy.

  “That’s a ridiculous analogy.”

  “You haven’t seen yourself explode,” said Amy.

  “You haven’t lived with your dad,” shouted Helen.

  “I have too.”

  “Look,” said Helen. “When you see a man in a sports car with a blonde young enough to be his granddaughter—”

  “Daughter,” snapped Amy. “It is physically impossible for him to have a granddaughter of driving age.”

  “—who has spent his entire driving life tooting at young women like some boy racer—”

  “He never did that with me,” said Amy.

  “—the last thing you expect is for that blonde to be a salesperson and the sports car to be a possible hire for a wedding.”

  “Well, I would,” said Amy.

  “Yes, but you’re not married to him.”

  “Neither are you, which you seem to forget.”

  “Forget? How can I when you keep talking about him?” yelled Helen.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” shouted Amy, “it’s pointless talking to you.”

  The bedsit door crashed shut.

  Footsteps raced down to the garage.

  I pulled a box from the boot. The bottom fell open and an avalanche of baby things cluttered to the floor. I pushed the contents about with my foot; no zinc . . .

  “Wait!” shouted Helen.

  The bedsit door crashed shut again.

  Amy stopped at the garage door, catching me trying to squash everything back into a boot that felt the size of a matchbox.

  “It’s you,” said Amy. “Mum thought it was the parking attendant come back to haunt her.” She feigned a laugh.

  Helen appeared behind her. “That’s not true,” she muttered.

  Amy looked at me. “Tell her she’s paranoid.”

  I stared at them, both standing with the same angry stance. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, if I got it wrong, there could be another explosion.

  “You haven’t any zinc, have you?” I muttered.

  “Zinc?” said Helen.

  “Just tell her,” said Amy, “she listens to you.”

  “No really, I’m in need of some zinc, and . . .” I stopped. “She listens to me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  No one listens to me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Lawyer

  Punching a cushion doesn’t solve anything.

  After Amy left, Helen took me upstairs to her bedsit.

  “I’ve got some zinc,” she said and, as I followed, she talked about how everything was so “fucking unfair.”

  Mum was right, she wasn’t handling things well. She hadn’t unpacked anything, the floor was a sea of boxes and bin bags, some unopened with tight knots at the top, others spilling out with clothes like someone in a frenzy had been looking for a bra and found a hairbrush.

  As she crashed about like a maniac, pointlessly searching, I wondered how she got dressed in the morning and marveled at her ability to arrive at work in clothes like she had pulled them out of a wardrobe.

  Then, in the middle of it all, was a notebook. It didn’t say “diary,” but still, I shouldn’t have read it, even though it was just a notebook. But, as Helen headed for the bathroom, I picked it up and it fell open onto a page—sort of—and I, without thinking, read . . .

  * * *

  Henry told me to go to the doctor’s and get something for my hormones. Even though I told him they were fine, he didn’t believe me. He seems to think that the menopause has turned me in to a man-hating lesbian with no brain, and all I needed were a few drops of estrogen and everything—meaning me—would be back to normal again.

  We were sitting in his aunt’s café, and he was talking to me like I was a two-year-old.

  I wanted to tell him why I had left, why I couldn’t go on with a man who barked orders at me like a sheepdog and, like the said sheepdog, expected me to obey. But when his aunt plonked a coffee under my nose like I wasn’t there, I said nothing—the words were stuck.

  Then he began to talk of his depression and how the split had made it difficult for him to work.

  “He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going,” said the pig of an aunt. “Such a hard-working man.”

  For a moment, I felt a twinge of guilt. He had lost weight, looked grey and worn out, and hadn’t touched his roll . . . and he loved his aunt’s sausage-filled rolls.

  “Can’t we try and be friends?” I said.

  “Friends?” he said.

  “Yes, maybe get some counselling, work out what went wrong—you never know.”

  Henry grabbed his roll and bit into it with venom; sauce squirted out the side of his lip. He was like a small boy not getting what he wanted.

  I felt sad for him.

  “The last thing I need is counselling. Either you come back or we go to a lawyer and that. On your so-called wage, won’t be cheap.”

  Henry began to talk of lawyers and money.

  “There’ll be bugger all for you,” he said. “You’ll end up in some bedsit with nothing.”

  That’s when I realized I didn’t have to listen anymore—or go into that friggin’ café ever again.

  I turned the page…

  Henry booked an appointment with a lawyer. I wanted to wait, get used to waking up on my own and the freedom of not being shouted at. But Henry insisted if I was leaving, then there was no point hanging aroun
d.

  We met outside the lawyer’s office.

  He grabbed my arm. “The house is only worth forty thousand, which is technically mine. If you agreed to a small sum, we could have everything settled quickly.”

  I said nothing; there were no words in my head.

  I never thought I would get away from him, and here I was outside a lawyer’s office.

  It was all so quick.

  I followed him up the poky stairs and sat, silent, as he talked of a quick settlement and how we had both agreed.

  I could see the lawyer was uncomfortable, annoyed. He didn’t like Henry, I could tell. In fact, he was just waiting for him to finish, and then when Henry did, the lawyer explained that we needed separate representation, and I—me, his wife—was “entitled to, well . . . half.”

  Henry went green, or almost green. His jaw jutted, his fist clenched, he seemed to shrink, and for a moment, I felt sorry for him.

  “But it’s my money,” said Henry.

  “In Scotland, she is entitled to half,” said the lawyer.

  Henry nearly choked on his coffee.

  They talked of different lawyers. I never said a word; it was like my lips had been stitched up.

  “I can act for one of you,” said the solicitor, “and give you a few phone numbers for the other. Now, which of you would you like me to help?” He pushed a few business cards across the table.

  Henry grabbed the cards. “You can have her,” he said.

  The solicitor smiled at me, and for the first time since I could remember, I felt safe.

  I followed Henry down the stairs. “You’re not getting half,” he said. “In fact, I’ll make sure you get nothing.”

  I watched him walk away. He was talking through his backside; I knew it, and I had an appointment with a lawyer who also seemed to think so.

  I stared at Henry’s back as he stomped down the road, and the funny thing was, I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. Perhaps just a little lighter.

  * * *

  I closed the notebook. I had never realized Henry could be so cruel.

  “Well, there’s no zinc in here,” Helen yelled from the bathroom.